The present invention relates to electronic equipment which has a display section with a dot matrix display and, more particularly, to electronic equipment which selects the number of characters within the maximum number of characters to be displayed at the display section in accordance with the display data, and which displays the number of selected characters.
In electronic equipment such as an electronic portable calculator, data which is entered at a key input section and calculated within a CPU, comprising the number of characters to be displayed at the display section, has conventionally been limited to data comprising 8, 10 or 12 characters. Therefore, when data such as a first operand and a second operand comprising 9 or more characters is input to an electronic portable calculator which displays 8 characters at maximum, input data is regarded as an error, disabling the operation. Further, when an operand result exceeds 8 characters, the operation is regarded as an error. Therefore, proper display cannot be accomplished. In this case, when an operation involving 10 or 12 characters is to be performed, another electronic portable calculator which is capable of displaying 10 or 12 characters must be purchased.
In exponential display, for example, data which exceeds the capacity of the number of characters to be displayed is entered at the key input section. When data comprising 8 characters such as "12345678" is input, this data is displayed in the manner as shown in FIG. 1A. However, when the exponential display is to be performed, a significant figure part, a blank part and an exponent part are simultaneously displayed within the range of 8 characters. As shown in FIG. 1B, the significant figure part comprises 5 characters such as "1.2345", the blank part comprises one character space, and the exponent part comprises 2 characters such as "10". Therefore, when the significant figure part comprises 6 characters or more, characters in excess of 5 characters are not displayed. For this reason, the number of characters at the display section must be increased.
However, when the number of characters to be displayed increases, including the case as described above, the display section must accordingly increase, resulting in an increase in manufacturing cost of the electronic equipment. Further, operations involving 9 characters or more are infrequently performed, so that an electronic portable calculator which displays 9 characters or more is rarely used to full display capacity, resulting in uneconomical operation.